Social media is an integral part of our life. If you are reading this article, you are – whether you know it or not – a proud member of Generation C.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest allow us to communicate and interact with friends and colleagues, but they also actively mould our digital persona in this 21st century.

As futuristic as this may sound to you, it’s happening right now in the same exact way as it happens in the unconnected universe: we interact with different networks and our actions and interactions give rise to what is known as our social capital.

Web services such as Klout, Kred and PeerIndex measure what we know, what we say and what we do. They rank us. And our ranks, in turn, influence how we connect and are connected within each individual network. Our influence can make or break a contact, help us gain followers, increase business and even tilt the scales one way or another in a job application.

Given this new order, I am somewhat bemused to learn that Klout believes I’m influential about apps and iTunes and that Peerindex ranks “Health and Medical” and “Finance, Business and Economics” as my top two benchmark topics! Kred seems to be slightly more on the ball highlighting “education” and “social media” as two of my top three interests, but fails miserably on the third: “sports”.

There is no such thing as a perfect virus or we wouldn’t be here to talk about it.

All networks – including human and server-based ones – operate according to a nearly universal series of fundamental properties. In fact, viral messages propagate throughout the media multiverse in much the same way as the Black Plague clawed its way through Medieval Europe.

Leaving aside our biological counterpart, however, a viral message is based on a remarkable idea. This is an idea that is worth remarking on, that is worth sharing.

In fact, as Seth Godin has pointed out, even a simple unorthodoxy will naturally attract interest as long as it is remarkable:

Cows are a perfectly normal occurrence on the side of the road, you’d never stop to see one, but a purple cow isn’t the norm; in fact, it would be quite astonishing. You might pull over to have a look.